cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2852886
For those out of the loop, some AMD users have been suffering from stuttering issues caused by the AMD fTPM random number generator. A firmware/BIOS update appears to fix the issue for some users, but not others, leading to more bug reports being sent in. Last week, Linus Torvalds said “let’s just disable the stupid fTPM hwrnd thing”, and, as of today the Linux kernel has gone ahead and blanket disabled RNG use for all current AMD fTPMs.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As a follow-up to the first-on-Phoronix article last month that highlighted Linus Torvalds’ frustrated views on the AMD fTPM random number generator continuing to cause problems for users even with updated firmware/BIOS, as of today the Linux kernel has gone ahead and blanket disabled RNG use for all current AMD fTPMs.
Mario summed up in that commit: tpm: Disable RNG for all AMD fTPMs
The TPM RNG functionality was previously disabled on a subset of AMD fTPM series, but reports continue to show problems on some systems causing stutter root caused to TPM RNG functionality.
Expand disabling TPM RNG use for all AMD fTPMs whether they have versions that claim to have fixed or not.
Thus over the next few days this change in behavior for modern AMD Ryzen systems will be rolling out in the next set of stable kernel point releases.
Hopefully this will lay to rest the various AMD stutter issues that continue to be reported by Linux users on recent kernel versions.
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